her lips together and stalked over. She touched the disconnect button.
'Hey!' he said. 'Get that finger out of here.' 'Thanks for your help, Mr. Herbert— Bob— but I'm going.' 'No you're not. There are probably hundreds of psychomilitants out there and you don't know what they're like.' 'I think I do.' 'You don't!' he yelled. 'That woman who captured you was Karin Doring. Do you know why she didn't kill you?
Woman-to-woman courtesy.' 'I know,' Jody said. 'She told me.' 'She won't make that mistake twice,' Herbert said.
'And the bottom-feeders who work for her won't make that mistake once. Shit, you probably won't even get past the sentries.' 'I'll find a way. I can be sneaky.' 'Even assuming you are, or assuming the sentries are green or they choke or both, what'll you do if you get there?
Kill Karin?' 'No,' Jody said. 'I don't want to be like her. I just want her to see me. I want her to see that I'm alive and unafraid.
She left me without anything in the trailer. No hope, no pride, zero. I've got to get that back.' 'But you have!' 'What you're seeing now?' Jody asked. 'This isn't pride, it's shame. The fear of shame. The fear that I'm too afraid to face her. I need to bite the ear of my torturer.' Herbert was totally confused. 'Excuse me?' 'It's something my grandfather once did. If I don't do that I'll never be able to walk into a dark room or down a lonely street without being afraid. My grandfather also said that Hitler controlled people through fear. I want these people to know that they didn't scare me. I can't do that from anywhere but the camp.' Herbert wheeled a half-turn closer to her. 'There's some tiuth to what you're saying, but going back there isn't the way to accomplish anything. You'll have about ten seconds of glory before they cut you down.' 'Not if you help me,' Jody said. She leaned toward him. 'I just want to show my face. That's all. If I don't run from this, I'll never run from anything. But if I do run, then that witch will have succeeded. She'll have killed an important part of me.' Herbert couldn't argue the point. If he was Jody, he'd want to do just what she was suggesting and then some.
But that didn't mean he was going to go along with her.
Herbert said, 'And how am I supposed to live with myself if anything happens to you? Besides, think about it.
You stayed calm. You fought back. You saved my life. You don't have anything to prove.' 'No,' Jody said. 'My demon is still out there. I am going and you can't stop me. I can outrun you.' 'Don't be fooled by the wheelchair, Jody Joyner- Kersee,' Herbert said. 'When I want to, I can fly.' He removed her finger and began redialing. 'Besides, I can't let you die. We're going to need you at a trial. I was with a German government official this morning, Deputy Foreign Minister Richard Hausen. He's devoted to their destruction.
Get your vengeance that way.' 'He's devoted to their destruction,' Jody repeated.
'And they're probably devoted to his. Hundreds against one.
Who do you think is going to win?' 'That depends who the 'one' is.' She replied, 'Exactly.' Herbert looked at her. 'Touch‚,' he said, 'but you're still not going.' Jody's mouth twisted. She rose and started walking away. 'Bullshit. Bullshit!' 'Jody, quiet down!' Herbert hissed. 'Judy— come back.' She shook her head and kept walking. Swearing, Herbert hung up and started after her. As he rolled up the slight dirt incline in a small thicket of trees, twigs cracked behind him. He stopped, listened, swore again.
Someone was coming. Either they'd heard them or had come to check on the police officer. Not that it mattered.
Jody was about twenty yards off and still moving away. He couldn't call to her lest he give himself away. There was only one thing to do.
It was charcoal-gray dark beneath the leaves. Slowly, quietly, Herbert rolled behind one of the trees. He listened.
There were two sets of footsteps. They stopped moving just about where the body would be. The question was, would they continue or retreat?
After a moment the footsteps continued in their direction. Herbert slid his stick from beneath the armrest and waited. Jody's footsteps. retreated to the right. He was frustrated at not being able to call to her and tell her to stop.
He let his breathing fall to his abdomen to relax him.
'Buddah Belly' they had called it when he was in rehabilitation. When he was taught that a man wasn't measured by whether he could walk but whether he could act.
Two men walked past. He thought he recognized them from the van. Herbert waited until they had walked by. Then he quickly wheeled behind the second man, swung his stick sideways, and clubbed him hard in the thigh. The man doubled over. When his friend turned around, his submachine gun at his side, Herbert brought the stick swinging back into his left kneecap. The man dropped faceforward, toward Herbert. Herbert struck him hard on the head. As the first man groaned and struggled to get back to his feet, Herbert hit him on the back of the neck. He flopped down, unconscious. Herbert sneered as he looked down at the two men.
I ought to kill them, he thought, his hand reaching for the Urban Skinner. But that would make him as vile as they were, and he knew it. Instead, he returned his stick to the armrest. Picking up the compact submachine gun, a Czech Skorpion, he set it in his lap and wheeled after Jody.
Even though he rolled as quickly as possible through the blue-black darkness of the woods, he knew that she had probably gone too far to catch. He thought about calling Hausen for help, but who could Hausen trust? According to Paul, the politician didn't even know that his own personal assistant was a neo-Nazi. Herbert couldn't call the police.
He'd killed a man and would probably be hauled off before Jody could be extricated. And even if they were working on the side of the law, what understaffed group of peacekeepers would march into a remote camp of militant radicals at the height of Chaos Days? Especially radicals who had calmly decimated the crew of a movie set.
As he had been trained from his earliest days in intelligence work, Herbert took stock of the things he knew for certain. First, in this situation he could only rely on himself. Second, if Jody reached the camp before him she would be killed. And third, she was probably going to reach the camp before him.
Gritting his teeth against the pain of his bruises, he gripped, his wheels and hurried after her.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
As Colonel Ballon sat watching the video monitor he thought, like most Frenchmen, how little he cared for Americans. Ballon had two younger sisters who lived in Quebec, both of whom were full of stories about how Americans were imperious and cocky and crude and just too damn near. His own experiences with tourists in Paris, where he was based, indicated to him quite clearly what the problem was. Americans wanted to be French. They drank, they smoked, and they dressed like the French did. They affected artistry and insouciance like the French did. Only they refused to speak like the French did. Even in France, they expected everyone to speak English.
Then there was the military. Because of Napoleon's disastrous Russian campaign and World War II, they assumed that members of the French armed forces were vastly inferior to American soldiers and deserved only the bones they signed to throw them.
But Bonaparte and the Maginot Line were aberrations in an otherwise proud military history, he told himself. Indeed, without the French military helping George Washington there would not be a United States. Not that the Americans would ever acknowledge that. Any more than they would allow that the Lumiere brothers, not Edison, invented motion pictures. Or that the Montgolfier brothers, not the Wright brothers, were the ones who enabled people to fly. The only good thing about Americans was that they gave him someone other than Germans to hate.
His phone beeped and he regarded it for a moment.
That would be him. Paul Hood. Ballon didn't really want to talk to this Mr. Hood, but he didn't want to let Dominique get away even more. Thus resolved— quickly, as with all things— he snatched up the phone.
'Oui?' 'Colonel Ballon?' 'Oui.' The caller said without missing a beat, 'Je suis Paul Hood. Vous avez besoin d'assistance?' Ballon was caught off guard by that. 'Oui,' he replied.
